Long or wide?

Barry Sonnenfeld, ace cinematographer turned ropey director, has a fondness for the wide-angle lens, which he considers particularly suited to comedy. And it’s true that the distortion of a wide-angle up close can add a goofy, cartoony quality to the simplest shot.

B.S., as I’m afraid we must call him, proselytized for the wide lens so strongly that when Billy Crystal noticed that his director on CITY SLICKERS II: THE SEARCH FOR CURLY’S GOLD (a Brit from commercials) was shooting with long lenses, he put in a panicky call to B.S.

“He’s using a long lens! It’s not going to be funny, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” replied Sonnenfeld confidently. And history proved him correct.

BUT you don’t get to be the director of MEN IN BLACK II and WILD WILD WEST without being catastrophically wrong at least 75% of the time, and I think Sonnenfeld is wrong about the the “long lens = unfunny” equation.

Here’s a moment from Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO. Having developed a multiple camera system of shooting that meant entire scenes could often be covered in a single performed take — long shots and closeups and everything – Kurosawa naturally relied upon the long lens to get close-ups of actors without finding himself filming his own cameras. He’d also exploited the lens for action scenes as early as THE SEVEN SAMURAI — you can’t have a horse fall literally on top of the camera, but you can make it seem to do so with a telefoto lens.

(Early footage on Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE was deemed unusable when Gilliam realised that his trademark wide-angle look was useless for filming horses galloping — they look tiny for ages, then big for an instant, then they’re gone. Peckinpah really shows the way for capturing horses in motion for sustained shots.)

Here’s a moment from YOJIMBO. It may give you eye strain — tiny details! The corrupt town guard is announcing the time in the extreme distance when, in the even extremer distance, wandering samurai Toshiro Mifune unexpectedly appears, spoiling for a fight. The guard does the most exaggerated double-take on record, then legs it.

The understatement of the angle, where the long lens flattens everything, and the background figures are not even 100% sharp, adds immeasurably to the success of the gag, especially by contrasting with the extreme ham of the guard’s full-body reaction. in fact, the contrast of performance and shooting style IS the gag.

No particular lens has a direct correlation to comedy gold. Hal Ashby makes use of long lenses in a way that’s slightly comparable to Kurosawa’s, and some of his stuff I find fantastically funny. Buster Keaton preferred a more neutral, middle-of-the-road lens, approximating the spacial perception of the human eye.

It’s a matter of sensibility, Barry.